Blog of me. I’m Alexander Jones.

20 September 2008

All the cool kids are doing it…

  1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
  2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair… just take a picture.
  3. Post that picture with no editing.
  4. Post these instructions with your picture.

17 September 2008

Re: Creationism!

Jen

I was going to bite with a lengthy response, but I can’t be arsed to read all of your comments to make sure I’m not repeating. So a couple of quick points, instead, for future reference of your own, and other misguided folk.

You’ve made the classic schoolgirl mistake. Evolution is a theory, yes, and so is gravity.

If you ask me, religion is a problem for humanity. Max Mosly’s Nazi S&M orgies don’t affect his ability to run Formula 1. Religious beliefs, however, tend to reflect on many things they really shouldn’t. And that’s why people should resign from their positions of responsibility if they can’t enforce a boundary. The Church of England’s treatment of Charles Darwin is a tragic, extreme, but perfect example of what problems we still face today in the scientific community.

10 September 2008

IE8 - Getting my web pages right, first time!

Just fired up IE NetRenderer to check the rendering of the new ICU Music Technology Society web page I was working on today.

Unsurprisingly, IE6 gets implicit font sizes wrong (base font size is 8pt, yet level 1 headings disregard this), ignores instruction to inherit colours (link colours don’t match the normal text foreground colour) and fails at alpha-blending PNG images.

IE7 blends the images properly, but that’s the only thing it gets right over IE6.

IE8 beta 2, however, gets everything right! Granted, the page is very simple, but I think this is the first time that any non-trivial page that I’ve coded has worked in IE without any extra work. I wonder if the scripting interfaces are up to standard yet... We may be out of the dark ages by the end of the decade if Microsoft roll this out to Windows users!

09 September 2008

The end of the world?

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN fires up Wednesday. Reading uneducated musings about the end of the world on message boards is LOLtastic.

But something did get me thinking...

Perhaps the search for extra-terrestrial life has shown up nought so far because every construct that evolves eventually becomes intelligent enough to destroy itself, inadvertently or otherwise, beyond detection. Curiosity is pretty good at killing cats—throw a high energy particle accelerator in and I reckon it could blow a pretty impressive hole in the Universe.

Whatever happens, it’s exciting times for science. The things we do for knowledge...

07 September 2008

070 numbers - NOT mobile phones!

070 is the prefix used for “Personal Numbering” in the UK. These numbers can be used like disguises for your real telephone numbers. Depending on your tariff, it may cost you an unexpected amount to call!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_United_Kingdom

(Seen on Gumtree, probably scam-vertisements.)